Montgomery County Council members Monday accused Pepco, the region’s largest electricity supplier, of ignoring basic system maintenance while leaving residents in the dark and lining the pockets of shareholders — as calls intensified for federal power reliability standards. “We have a public utility that allowed its system to degrade over many years to the point where the service — on sunny days — is the worst in the state, worst in the region and has been in the lowest quartile in the nation for five years,” said Councilman Roger Berliner, D-Bethesda/Potomac. “It is truly Third World service.” Pepco rolled out a plethora of high-ranking officials to offer an apology, of sorts, for outages that left nearly 140,000 county customers without power during a fairly routine winter storm.

But the apology largely fell on deaf ears as council staff noted that Pepco Holdings Inc., which includes Pepco, Delmarva Power and Atlantic City Electric, paid more than $1 billion to shareholders between 2005 and 2009.